


In This World (not that one)

by im_ashamed



Category: Dragon Ball
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Drabble, Dreams, F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-07
Updated: 2018-07-07
Packaged: 2019-06-06 19:56:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15202307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/im_ashamed/pseuds/im_ashamed
Summary: Who is living in the best timeline? (Vegebul fluff)





	In This World (not that one)

There is a world where a woman cracks cold fusion at the same time, a galaxy apart, a prince ascends to his rightful throne. They are both quiet people, except when they are screaming passionately at others, and they are happy. The woman claims a nobel prize, and the man rules a world with a just, if severe, fist. 

Sometimes, at night, they each lie in their beds, stare at the stars, and hunger for dishes they’ve never tasted. 

Most nights they sleep.

* * *

 

There is a world where a woman runs through the ruins of what was once her society and tries to scavenge a spaceship from whatever is left. 

 

There is a world where she makes it off the planet before the planet is no more.

 

There is a world where she does not. 

* * *

 

There is a world where two men stand on the top wall of a severed skyscraper. One nudges the other and says, “Look, Vegeta, someone missed an ant” and they do not hear her scream as the laser cuts through her.

* * *

 

 

There is a world where a woman gets her period, right on time, and blood runs out of her like fuel from a spaceship’s broken tank. At least that’s what she tells herself when she never sees him again. 

* * *

 

There is a world where one of the best (and most photogenic) scientists is sent to make first contact with the aliens who fell out of the sky into a cornfield in Kansas with all the ceremony of a broken weather balloon. 

The woman is pleased to learn that her claim that there wasn’t a man in the galaxy worth her time turns out to be true. She rests her hand on her burgeoning baby bump during the peace talks, and relations between sayians and humans remain civil all her life. 

* * *

 

There is a world where a prince destroys a planet, just as he was taught. He renders the planet’s pathetic excuse for a civilization smoke and rubble before pillaging whatever he likes. He brings a woman home with him because he likes the color of her hair and the shape of her figure. 

He doesn’t know that this woman has four degrees under her belt. He does not take her for a challenge to his clearly superior intellect. 

He ends up with solvent burning through his eyes, and before his hair goes up in flames. In three minute he goes from the final sayain prince to a body drifting in space. She eventually becomes a high ranking general in the intergalactic army. She cries every night for the rest of her life, but she lives. 

 

* * *

 

Bulma wakes with a sob. Her hands are shaking. She can’t quite believe she was crying in her sleep. She’s only done it twice before. 

“What? What?” Vegeta barks, barely awake. It’s the reaction of a man used to being woken in tents and told the enemy was advancing, and it shocks Bulma for a second, thinking that he’s angry at her. 

“Lights!” He yells, and the lights come on.

“You don’t have to yell,” Bulma says, trying to steady her breathing.

“What happened?”

Bulma wipes her tears on the back of her hand. “Nothing. I was having a weird dream.”

“Oh,” Vegeta lies back down. “Lights, dim!”

Bulma chokes between a giggle and a sob, because she is pretty sure that Vegeta wanted this feature just so he could bark more commands at things.

Vegeta waits until Bulma is more or less under control again before asking, “What was the dream about?”

Bulma lies back down so her head is on Vegeta’s shoulder. He wraps his arm around her waist and squeezes her hip, just for second.

“I don’t know,” She says. “It was a feeling, mostly.”

  
“Hm.” 

Bulma feels Vegeta’s chest rise and fall. Whenever someone asks what made her fall in love with Vegeta, she says it was the sex. And that was true. At some point the sex bleed over into sleeping together, and one night she got up to go to the bathroom, and when she came back Vegeta was almost awake. “I had a dream…” He said, his eyes half closed. 

Bulma got back on the bed and pulled the covers up to her shoulders. There is a certain intimacy from sharing a blanket with someone, a union from being held together by two big, warm arms. “Yeah?”

“The short one…Krillin,”

Bulma was surprised Vegeta knew Krillin’s name.

“He was standing on a mountain telling me to eat rocks,”

Bulma snorted and Vegeta cracked an eye to look at her.

“And I was fuckin’ eating them!”

Bulma actually laughed at that, and something slipped free inside of her, a drop of water falling from a leaf to the pond beneath. It was so small, but that strange yet simple happiness filled her up and made her shake. And right then Vegeta laid his hand on her arm and said, “It’s cold?” and Bulma decided to love him.

Now she lay against him and said, “You know how there’s a lot of timelines?”

“Infinite timelines.”

“Right. Infinite.” 

Infinity stretches to the edge of the universe and beyond. To the next world, and the next world, and the next. And out beyond that, there is a world. 

“But, you know,” Bulma says, not sure she is brave or silly enough to end the sentence, “Of all the timelines out there, if one was better than another…” She can’t do it. She isn’t even sure why she would think it.

Vegeta’s lips brush against her hair, not quite a kiss, and he says, not quite a whisper, “This one’s the best.”

There is a world where for a moment, all is right with it.


End file.
